In service of “by their fruits ye shall know them” and all that, I was in Cambridge last weekend using a night out with some friends to find out whether a patch hailed as “the licence to booze” can deliver on its promise. The night in question had a Facebook event page that hilariously riffed on the debauched habits of Bacchus, god of wine, and the drunken feasts the Greeks used to host in his honour, so if ever a “licence to booze” were going to be tested, this was the night.

In the interests of research, and in order to ensure the manufacturers couldn’t explain away any potential underperformance by claiming that it works on some types of drinks better than others, I drank broadly. Between supper at 7pm and hitting the hay at 4.30am I had knocked back varying measures of champagne, red wine, white wine, lager, apple Sourz, gin and tonic, a piña colada and a bright pink Singapore Sling, the last of which I presumably bought subconsciously, to undermine the idea among any observers that heavy-duty boozing comes naturally to me.

In the press release announcing its arrival, the patch was described as a “remedy” for “really horrendous hangovers”. It would “stop hangovers before they start”, it said, because of its “powerful blend of vitamins, nutrients and antioxidants”. Its creator, a plastic surgeon from New York, was quoted saying that “only an intravenous drip stuck in your arm while drinking could be more effective”. Firebox, the online store marketing the patch in the UK, told the Standard it has been the fastest-selling product in the company’s history. The “licence to booze” claim was splashed on the front of a morning newspaper last week, and during its US roll-out The New York Times narrated the PR story of its birth — “After a night of hard partying in Manhattan” when “a light bulb” went off in the creator’s head. With Christmas party season coming up, what more could Londoners want?

Quite a lot more, it turns out. When I roused myself at 10am to greet a miserably grey Sunday, I felt my usual combination of tolerable tiredness, sickness and dehydration, and got on with my day as normal. Nothing had changed, or improved, or moved me, apart from a curiosity to find out when I got back to my desk on Monday how this widely covered product had won itself so much bark on the back of so non-existent a bite.

I called Dr Sarah Jarvis, a GP in Shepherd’s Bush who advises the drinking charity Drinkaware. It is “neatly packaged up with pseudo-science”, she said, but “the only thing that is going to improve is the size of their bank balances”.

When people get a hangover, Jarvis explains, we are experiencing a combination of dehydration and the presence of the alcohol’s toxins in our system. The dehydration can be solved by drinking water along the way and at the end of the night, and our bodies are reasonably good at combating the toxins as long as we give it a chance to do so.

“The effects of deficiency in B-vitamins particularly are very common among people who are drinking, and we would recommend vitamin supplements to an alcoholic, but even then you absolutely do not need to replace them while you are drinking.”

“It is not vitamin deficiency that gives you a hangover,” says Jarvis, “I think they are being cynical.”

A day after I asked the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the body responsible for approving medicinal products in the UK, if they had tested it, a spokesman called to say that it had banned its sale in this country, issuing an “urgent notice to Firebox.com asking them to remove the hangover patch Bytox from sale.”

The MHRA’s reasoning was that it considered it to be making a medicinal claim, making it “an unlicensed medicinal product”, which it is an offence under the Human Medicines Regulations 2012 to advertise or sell.

A spokesman for the body said that “claims made on their website that it [the patch] prevents hangovers” were behind the decision.

Within minutes, Firebox’s website published a message on the product’s page, mourning that “despite overwhelming demand, huge public interest and plenty of positive customer feedback we’ve had to stop selling this product”.

The message continued: “We would need a special licence in order to continue marketing this product, and ... we have opted to stop selling this product immediately.”